The Pulitzer Prizes Are Full of Transparent Hackery!

David Harsanyi on May 9, 2025

Last week, Mosab Abu Toha, a Hamas apologist and serial fabricator who vilified female Israeli hostages and justified their kidnapping on Oct. 7, won the 2025 Pulitzer Prize for commentary for a series of essays about Gaza in The New Yorker.

It is unsurprising, because the Pulitzer Prizes have become an irremediable joke.

You'd think that the Pulitzers, administered and awarded by Columbia University, would want to repair its tattered reputation after awarding a slew of debunked pieces that spread the Russia collusion hoax. They went in another direction.

The Pulitzer for "public service," for instance, went to the leftist propaganda site ProPublica for "exposing the fatal consequences of abortion bans." ProPublica is perhaps the nation's leading purveyor of Potemkin journalism, which entails dressing up political propaganda with neutral-sounding journalistic verbiage to create the impression that you've done genuine reporting.

Its abortion stories are perhaps the sloppiest and sleaziest of its catalog, even worse than its string of pitiful smears against Supreme Court justices. In a healthy environment, journalism schools would use them as prime examples of hackery and conjecture.

Take their award-winning story on Amber Thurman. In August 2022, the 28-year-old Georgia woman checked herself into a suburban Atlanta hospital emergency room, complaining of severe pain. She was suffering from an infection caused by the remains of twin fetuses she had aborted by pill five days earlier.

The first thing you'll notice when reading ProPublica's Pulitzer Prize-winning reporters is that they fail to offer a single on-the-record source who maintains that abortion laws slowed or stopped doctors from providing medical help for Thurman.

Not one.

Indeed, a reader must plow through to the 57th paragraph of the article to find this throwaway line: "It is not clear from the records available why doctors waited to provide (emergency help)."

Not clear? That's a remarkable concession to make deep into a story. The headline, after all, promises to prove that "Abortion Bans Have Delayed Emergency Medical Care." Have, not may have.

Anyway, by "not clear," the reporters mean no testimony exists to support the implication that a dilation and curettage procedure, in which the lining of the uterus is scraped to remove tissue, was delayed because doctors were nervous about Georgia's abortion law.

Whenever the story hits a juncture at which any real reporter would feel compelled to offer corroboration, ProPublica switches to interviewing nameless "OB-GYNs in states that outlawed abortion" or pro-abortion activists who offer politically motivated guesswork.

We call that a "column" in the business.

To confuse readers, ProPublica regularly conflates miscarriages with elective abortions. And here's the thing: The fetuses had already been destroyed. There was absolutely no legal basis for any doctor, not even one confused about the supposed ambiguities of abortion laws, to fail to give Thurman all the care she needed. That seems like a vital fact that should have been mentioned somewhere in a 3,400-word investigative piece.

I don't care where you stand on abortion, that's not journalism. Yet, this is the type of hackery that wins you a Pulitzer these days.

The only inarguable truth in the Thurman case is that she died from complications caused by abortion pills. That's the headline. That's the buried lede. Knowing this, ProPublica feels compelled to assure readers that there are only "rare complications" from abortion pills -- "extremely rare" even.

Indeed, there is now mounting evidence that mifepristone is less safe than the Food and Drug Administration has led women to believe. When two pro-life researchers at the Ethics and Public Policy Center reviewed health insurance claims from over 800,000 chemical abortions, they found that complications occurred in about 1 in 10 cases.

Maybe they should have won the Pulitzer Prize.

But ProPublica, funded by a deep-pocketed progressive group, exists to create fake stories for politicians to use as oppo material. You may remember when many political experts assured us that the Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization decision and resulting state-level abortion limitations would forever sink the entire GOP?

Well, less than a week after the Thurman story hit, Axios reported that Senate Democrats would launch a "blitz on emergency abortion care this week after ProPublica reporting on death of Georgia woman."

Former Vice President Kamala Harris mentioned Thurman on many occasions.

It should be said that ideological bias doesn't prevent a journalist from making arguments that rely on facts. It is implausible, however, that any genuine journalist could possibly believe ProPublica's Thurman story was well reported or that Abu Toha's essays enlightened anyone.

And the fact that Pulitzers reward this kind of transparent hackery only further destroys their already battered credibility.

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David Harsanyi is a senior writer at the Washington Examiner. Harsanyi is a nationally syndicated columnist and author of five books -- the most recent, "The Rise of Blue Anon," available now. His work has appeared in National Review, the Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, Reason, New York Post and numerous other publications. Follow him on X @davidharsanyi.